Tracy opened her delivery of some Fibre Optic Lights today. We are not sure what we'll use them for yet but they look interesting:

While the lighting on the stairs was being worked on, we had no lights on the landing. To make it safer going up to bed, we used an RF remote to trigger a appliance module to turn a lamp on in the bedroom. This also had the advantage of being able to turn the light off later without getting out of bed.

The natural extension of this using the new X10 lighting is to have the same "On" button triggering a sequence of light settings - a "scene". So now the "On" signal triggers a simple sequence of commands:

x10 turn l_landing on
x10 turn l_bed_2 on
x10 turn l_bath on

They set the scene for going up to bed. Later, the "Off" signal triggers a second sequence:

x10 turn j1 lightsoff
x10 turn l1 lightsoff

That is the X10 magic necessary to turn off any lights we happened to leave on anywhere in the house. This is great! No more going back to the bottom of the stairs to switch of the hall light.

It's great to see how even simple things like this are coming together. Things should really pick up now that the first phase of electrical work is coming to an end. (Phase two will be the new fan/light for node 0 and phase three will be the en-suite electrics - i.e. underfloor warming, demister, fan, etc.)

Well, I wasn't sure about having coloured lights when Tracy first talked about it, but now I definitely love the idea. The effects you can create are great. We've been experimenting lighting different objects - like the radiator covers in our living room - but the photos really don't do them justice.

We've set up some neat controls based on this Colour Wheel.

Tracy's ChromaDome, from A.C. Lighting, arrived this week. It's going to be really neat when we have this installed lighting the tall space above the stairs.

Since we're sold on the Pulsar Chroma range now, I cancelled the outstanding order for the DMX pinspot. (I don't blame 10outof10 for not completing the order because I was told by other suppliers that they were impossible to get hold of when I placed the order in July.) Now we just need to decide what Chroma lights we are going to use to bring colour to the white walls of the kitchen.

We've had the Pulsar ChromaZone12 controllers for ages but we've only just got around to ordering the lamps. We ordered four MR16 Chroma Hearts from A.C. Lighting.

They look great.

I can't wait to see them in the en-suite shower. They are brighter than I expected which is good because it means we should get away with just two for the shower leaving a couple spare for elsewhere.

I decided to experiment creating a small video. It works on my Linux box but might not be useable on Windows.